An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature

August 01, 2005

Poison in the Ink: Visiting Trinity

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bendYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

--John Donne

I arrive a little before 10, two hours after the gates have opened. From the parking lot, it is a quarter-mile walk along a dusty dirt road to the spot where the atomic bomb was exploded. Ground Zero is a large shallow depression, about 500-yards across and oval-shaped. A tall chain-link fence topped with lines of razor barbed wire rings the perimeter. It is loneliness couched in desolation, a remote forbidden place abandoned for most of the year. Scattered thickets of saltbrush and gray-green clusters of desert grass dot the arid landscape. Beyond the fence, bleak desert terrain stretches out toward jagged horizons where the mountains meet the sky.

Inside ground zero, a squat obelisk made of volcanic rock stands to the right of center. Its stones are dark and porous and a large bronze plaque, weathered and dark, adorns one of its four sides. The inscription reads simply:

TRINITY SITE

WHERE THE WORLD'S FIRST NUCLEAR

DEVICE WAS EXPLODED

ON JULY 16, 1945

Beneath, a smaller plaque identifies Trinity as a National Historic Landmark.

To the left of the obelisk juts a small outcropping of rock. Embedded within are two metal bars, each as thick as a man's wrist. They are all that remain of the 100-foot steel tower that held the bomb; the rest of the structure was vaporized by the blast. Trinity's scientists assembled the bomb atop the tower in hopes of reducing the amount of radioactive dust raised by the explosion and because they needed to simulate an air-drop.

Near the edge of the site, a model of Fat Man—the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war and an exact replica of the bomb tested at Trinity—sits alone on the trailer of a flatbed truck. To the far left, a low-roofed metal shack covers a part of the original blast crater. Small pieces of Trinitite, the green glass formed at the moment of the explosion, lie exposed on the ground for visitors to see.

Here, people walk slowly, heads lowered, eyes searching. A woman kicks repeatedly at a spot on the ground, whipping up a small cloud of dust. Children scamper about and return to their parents with unearthed treasures.

“Is this trinitite?” a small boy asks hopefully.

“No, that's leavitrite,” his father says. “As in leave-it-rite there cause it ain't worth a thing.”

A series of weathered photographs hang evenly spaced along a curving portion of the fence. Among them are images that trace the evolution of the blast, captured at haphazard intervals with a high-speed camera. At .006 seconds, it is a ball of concentrated fury, an enormous dome of searing white brilliance that outshines the midday sun. By .025 seconds, a murmur of rising dust has formed around the base of the dome. By .100 seconds the murmur has become a shriek as shockwaves from the blast fling clouds of swirling dust outwards in all directions. The fireball rises, expands, and cools. As it cools, liberated particles of dust and debris begin to fall away and rain to earth. By 15 seconds, the classic mushroom shape is clearly visible. Far above the clouds now, it stops and hangs suspended, like a sculpture made of ash, until blowing winds sweep away its form.

Peggy Shephard saw the blast from her home in Roswell, 90 miles away. She was 21 at the time.

“I was filling up a kerosene lamp to light the fire, and when I turned around, I saw something, and you can't believe it, you could never describe it, not if you lived to be a hundred,” she says. “But if you would take a rainbow and put it in a little strip like that,”—she gestures with her hands—“and put it in that cloud and mix it like that, you'd get sort of an idea—the colors… oh ….” Her voice breaks in aching remembrance.

Shephard is standing outside Trinity's entrance, in front of a bungalow that serves as the information center. She has a shock of unruly gray hair, and her pink floral print dressing gown flutters gently in the wind. “It was beautiful,” she says. “I mean purple and orange and blue and black and green, it just walked around like this in the clouds.” Her voice becomes shrill, exasperated. “I could never describe it.”

In 1905 Albert Einstein forever changed our views of time and space, proved the existence of atoms and linked mass and energy with his Special Theory of Relativity. His famous equation, E=mc2, stated that an enormous amount of energy was contained within a tiny amount of matter. This revolutionary idea was only theory at the time, and remained largely unproven until 5:29am on July 16, 1945. On that morning, the first atomic bomb was exploded in the sands of New Mexico, on a patch of barren desert known as Trinity.

Trinity is located within White Sands Missile Range, a private military base and a testing ground for some of the world's most advanced military equipment. The V2 rocket and the B-2 stealth bomber were tested here. At almost 3,200 square miles, the site is the largest military installation in the country. In centuries past, it was part of the King's Highway, a road that connected Mexico City and Santa Fe. Spaniards had another name for this place. They called it the “Jornado del Muerto,” the Trail of Death, in grim reference to those who perished from thirst along its route.

Twice a year, on the first Saturdays of April and October, and for only six hours at a time, Trinity opens to the public. No tickets or reservations are required, and there is no major effort to advertise the event. People typically hear about the open house through word of mouth. Many show up on the appointed day at the fair grounds in Almagordo, New Mexico, and from there drive 170 miles to the test site, snaking across the desert in a caravan lead by military vehicles. Others arrive by different routes, alone and unescorted, or they come as part of packaged tours.

People visit Trinity for different reasons. They come to remember, to give thanks, to pay penance, to make peace, to see a wonder of the modern world: the birthplace of the atomic age. There are older visitors who helped develop the bomb and military veterans who believe that Trinity set off a chain of events that ultimately spared their lives by sparing the country an invasion of Japan. Middle-aged visitors can still recall the duck-and-cover drills from their childhood and the fear of sudden annihilation that pervaded the cold war era. Others come because they are curious, drawn by the knowledge that what happened here helped shape the world in which they live.

“I think a lot of people come here because in one instant the test that happened here changed the world,” says Monte Marlin, a docent at the event. “They want to just appreciate that and try to understand it.”

Marlin sits perched on a wooden stool off to a side within ground zero, conspicuous in a bright orange vest. “A lot of this is also just tourism,” she says. “It's a site in New Mexico that is rarely open to the public, and they want to have a chance to come see it.”

Around noon, I spot Ben Benjamin standing in front of the bungalow. Benjamin is 73, his hair and mustache are white and the shoulders on his tall frame are slightly stooped. Today, he is wearing a black cowboy hat and a light blue denim jacket that matches his jeans. Benjamin's large hands are stuffed partway into his jean pockets, and he is gazing around at the crowd, looking like an uncomfortable cowboy surrounded by strangers .

Last night, after a five-hour flight from New York, I drove down to Albuquerque's National Atomic Museum to hear Benjamin give a talk about Trinity. Benjamin is a military veteran and a member of the engineering division that was responsible for taking pictures of the blast. Approximately 150 people attended the talk, most of them part of a Trinity tour arranged by the museum.

Benjamin began his talk with a photographic transparency of a black-and-white aerial shot of Nagasaki, taken shortly after the city was leveled by Fat Man. In the center of the photograph, a lone shack stood undamaged amidst a sprawling sea of rubble and flattened buildings. No people were visible. The photograph was the first and only reference in Benjamin's talk to the devastating effects of the bomb. The rest of the lecture was devoted to the story of how Benjamin joined the army and his role in the bomb's development. After the talk, I discovered that Benjamin was going to be at Trinity the next morning and we arranged to meet again.

Seeing him now, I go up and say hello and we retreat to a patch of shade behind the bungalow to talk. I ask Benjamin to recall the moment of the blast.

“Oh my god, it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen in my life,” he says. “It was incredibly bright, it was just staggering, and the heat on my body, I could just feel the heat from that thing even from 6 miles.”

Benjamin was 23 at the time, and was sitting in a rotating gun turret that was modified to take photographs when he saw the blast. “I've witness a lot of atmospheric blasts since then, but none of them were as impressive as Trinity,” Benjamin says. “Nobody knew what was gonna happen here, the physicist weren't sure what was going to happen and they certainly didn't know how big it was gonna be.”

I ask Benjamin if the people at Trinity knew how the bomb was going to be used. “When this test went off, the Germans had already unconditionally surrendered,” he says. “So it was obvious that the Japanese were going to be the recipients of it.”

How did you feel when you heard that Hiroshima had been bombed, I ask. Benjamin doesn't answer me directly. Instead, he tells me that on August 6, 1945, the day that Hiroshima was bombed, he was visiting his parents in Duluth, Minnesota.

“I said to my mother and father ‘Now, I can tell you what I was doing in New Mexico, I was working on this project.'”

I try again, but this time with a different approach. What were people's reactions like when they heard the news, I ask.

“Most people felt ‘gee, that's great, they used the bomb and a few days later the Japanese surrendered,'” he says. “Everyone had been worried considerably that we were going to have to invade Japanese islands and millions of our guys would probably get killed, and millions of Japanese.”

But did people know that the bomb was dropped on civilian centers? How did they feel about that?

Benjamin shrugs. “Everybody was elated as far as I could tell,” he says. I take a moment to let this sink in, and then I decide to drop it. We move on and he begins to describe in detail for me the specifics of the blast.

Later in the day, I speak to Jim Eckles, the public relations manager for White Sands Missile Range and Trinity's unofficial historian. “A lot of people say that this is the event that ushered in the atomic age,” he says. “There are some people that say this is the most important event of 20th Century or in the history of mankind.”

Eckles is tall and lean and is wearing the same bright orange vest that all the docents wear. He has a silver beard and mustache and wears a black cap. A blue bandana is tied around his neck. For most of the open house, Eckles sits in front of the bungalow entrance, entertaining visitors and answering their questions. As we talk, a number of people stroll up.

“If I were to read all the stuff that you've read and know what you know, what is the most jaw-dropping-drop-dead-fact that I would know?” one man asks.

Eckles laughs. “I don't know.”

“What's the biggest, the brightest, most important thing to know about Trinity?”

“ Sheesh , beats the heck out of me,” says Eckles, but he finally relents and tries to give the man something to take home. “I can come up with a lot of things,” he begins. “The interest people have in the site, why they keep coming back, the fact that you can walk on a ground zero area and not die. Those things we grew up with—fearing nuclear weapons, that it was going to be radioactive forever and kill ya—well, that's not quite true.”

A little while later, Eckles is approached by a husband and wife.

“What's this over here?” the husband asks.

“Ground zero, it's where the bomb was exploded. You go down there to get your radiation,” Eckles says.

“And then we'll glow in the dark huh?” asks the wife.

“Probably not.”

She chuckles. “That would be a good way to entertain grandkids!”

“There you go,” Eckles says.

“I'm disappointed,” says the husband, and he really does look disappointed.

Radiation still concerns visitors at Trinity. “Your average American can't explain their toaster, so they're not gonna understand this,” Eckles says.

Eckles tells me about some of the myths and theories that exist regarding Trinity. “For instance, some people say that the sands at White Sands were bleached white because of the atomic bombing,” he says. “Well, that's so nonsensical it's funny, but there's stuff like that floating around out there.”

As if on cue, a little while later a guy comes up and asks, “When we were driving in, there were unusual cactus, are they the original…uh…they aren't mutated cacti?”

Eckles spreads his arms wide. “You mean those giant ones that are normally this big?” he asks. The question is followed by a spurt of wheezy laughter. “There's no giant cactus down there,” he says finally. “But the yuccas are big.”

A table is set up outside the gates of ground zero to try and educate the public and dispel their fears about radiation. Health physicist Kelly Todd is stationed at the table. “We have a lot of people asking about how dangerous it is and what the [radiation] levels are,” Todd says. “We try to show them that the things that are found here are not dangerous compared to the things found in their own homes.”

Among the items lying on the table are a fire alarm, a dinner plate, a banana and a pack of cigarettes. Todd explains that the fire alarm contains trace amounts of americium 241, a radioactive element required for smoke detection. The clay of the dinner plate, uranium; the banana, potassium 40; and the cigarettes, plutonium 210—an element that nuclear fallout has spread around the globe and which, according to Todd, tobacco plants have a high affinity for. The public affairs office at White Sands maintains that on average, the radiation levels at Trinity are only 10 times greater than the region's natural background level. They say that a one-hour visit to Ground Zero will result in a whole body exposure of one-half to one millirem. To put this in perspective, a U.S. adult receives 360 millirems on average every year from natural and medical sources .

By 1:15 in the afternoon, the crowd at Trinity has thinned, but John Lyle is just arriving, accompanied by his family. Lyle, 90, moves slowly, aided by a walker. For his first trip to Trinity, Lyle is dressed neatly in a buttoned blue shirt, cream-colored khakis and a brown cap.

A lieutenant colonel in the army during World War II, Lyle had just moved west with his wife when the Trinity shot happened. “The army was forming divisions all up and down the west coast and we were going to get all the ships available and take a military over to Japan,” he recalls.

Lyle speaks slowly, his words spaced by long silences and short shallow breaths. “And we knew that 80 percent—8 out of 10 of us—who made this trip to Japan were going to be casualties.” Lyle laughs, a slightly hysterical, disbelieving laugh.

“I felt sorry for the people,” he says. “It's a sad thing that it had that devastation, but I accepted it as part of what we had to do.”

A small crowd forms around Lyle as he speaks. “They'll never put a guilt trip on me though because of what the country did, because we stopped the war,” he says. “We stopped it.”

Lyle's eyes are wet and his jaw is clenched. “It's a very emotional experience for him,” says Mary Utrop, Lyle's daughter. “When my Mom and Dad made that trip across country, they thought it would be the last time they would be together.”

Some historians have argued that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was unnecessary. They say that Japan was already in the process of preparing for peace negotiations, that the casualties America would have suffered had it invaded Japan would have been far less than one million—the number generally cited—and that not every diplomatic effort had been exhausted before dropping the bombs. But I bring none of this up with Lyle.

Trinity is a site filled with contradictions, and perhaps nothing captures that fact better than the name itself. J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist of the Manhattan Project, christened both the site and the atomic test with the single code-name Trinity. When the Project's director asked for an explanation, Oppenheimer's only response was a cryptic reference to a John Donne poem that he knew and loved. The poem is a desperate plea by Donne to the Creator in all his tripartite forms. Its lines beg forgiveness from God and invites the Holy Spirit to batter, break, burn, ravage and destroy the poet's sinful heart in order that he might be reborn. It is a poem about death and resurrection and redemption through violence.

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A recent post asked the question "What's the point of blogging?". Well, as a blog *reader* I find that nearly every book I read intersects with the subject of some blog entry, and usually sooner rather than later. Right now I am reading "The Joy of Insight", which is the biography of the physicist Victor Weisskopf who (among other things) worked on the bomb. So a couple of quotes from the book that are relevant to this post.

From this post:

"...some people say that the sands at White Sands were bleached white because of the atomic bombing."

From the book:

(p.153) "What we saw upon arrival was a flat area about 400 meters in diameter in which the sand of the desert was glazed into a solid reflecting surface."

About the use of the bomb, from the book:

"One question, in particular, remained unresolved: Why was the second bomb dropped over Nagasaki? The timing- just three days after Hiroshima- had not permitted the Japanese government to sue for peace had it wanted to. Could it have been that the U.S. military was eager to see the effect of a plutonium bomb now that they knew what a uranium-235 bomb could accomplish, even though our test at Alamogordo had shown that a plutonium bomb would work as planned? On some occasion I ventured to say that the first bomb might have been justifiable, but the second was a crime."

Ker Than is a new columnist at 3QD, and judging from his first piece, a damn good one! Thanks Ker, for a fascinating account of your visit to this historically resonant site. I really enjoyed it! We look forward to more from you...

This reminds me of when my dad said that he would have dropped the bomb no problem, knowing that it could have potentially saved millions. I don't think there's ever an easy way to talk about what had happened. I just know that preventing this sort of thing is the best way we can avoid ever having to confront it. I wrote a piece awhile ago that's kind of muddled, but still worth consideration. Read it here.

Basically this post-nuclear era, or the grappling with the after-shocks of the Cold War, and an age when we're going to see these weapons getting into the hands of a lot of these so-called "rogue" states, gives us a lot more hope than most ever consider. It's why Fermi's paradox is so utterly mind-boggling. Does civilization ever progress beyond this point? I think that the nuclear age is our trial by fire.

At the chemical level, exothermic energies given off in chemical reactions are measured in electron volts per atom. For example, in combustion with oxygen, hydrogen combined with oxygen gives off energy plus water, the energy being of the order of electron volts. Oxygen combined with numerous other substances (fuels) gives off energy plus Carbon Dioxide and water.
The energy given off can be used in a controlled way, like an internal combustion engine, or an uncontrolled way, like dynamite to blow up rock formations in the ground. An internal combustion engine controls the amount of fuel and oxygen mixture and ignites it at just the right instant when the piston is at the top of its stroke, causing an explosion which forces the piston and connecting rod to turn the crankshaft of the engine and convert the chemical energy of the fuel air mixture into mechanical energy plus heat. Most internal combustion engines are very inefficient with only about 15% of the chemical energy going to kinetic energy, the remainder going out the exhaust pipe as wasted heat. A turbocharger increases efficiency by using this heat to force additional oxygen into the combustion chamber. A supercharger increases efficiency by simply pressurizing the air into the combustion chamber.
When uranium 235 is combined with a neutron about 200 million electron volts of energy is given off in addition to 2 more neutrons. If one has enough of this substance available in the right size, these additional neutrons can cause additional reactions (chain reactions) each one giving off more neutrons and 200 million electron volts of energy. This energy transformation is a result of transformations amoung the nuclear energy levels of nuclei as the chemical transformations of normal oxidation are a result of chemical transformations. Nuclear chain reactions giving off millions of times the energy of chemical reactions can also be "controlled" or "uncontrolled".
An uncontrolled chain reaction results in a "bomb" releasing millions of times the amount of energy provided by similar chemical reactions. But even with a bomb, how does one make a "trigger"? The answer is, as discovered by the distinguished physicist Enrico Fermi and others, that neutron production is a volume effect, where neutron loss is a surface effect. If the size is small enough that the loss rate is greater than the production rate, the system will be stable; if the size is such that the production rate is greater than the loss rate, the system will be unstable. There is a certain "critical size" which the two are equal. This size can be calculated under certain assumptions and geometries of the Uranium fuel.
What if one sought to use this energy in an internal combustion engine in place of gasoline and oxygen? Wouldn't it produce an enormous amount of energy? Yes, but all it would do is melt the pistons, so no conversion to mechanical energy would result. This is why even a "nuclear" submarine has a steam engine, so the nuclear energy is first used to produce steam, which then runs a steam engine.
The book Levi is reading is an excellent one. There is an interesting bit of "trivia" associated with it: Weisskopf points out that Max Born was his formal supervisor for his Ph.D. at Gottingen, but since he had a stroke, and since Weisskopf did not relate well to him anyway, the distinguished experimental physicist and Nobel prize winner James Frank became his defacto supervisor. James Frank was one of the distinguished pupils of Emil Warburg, the distinguished Father of Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D. whom I have commented on in other posts. Murray Gell-Mann, one of the principal discoverers of the quarks, is one of the distinguished pupils of Victor Weisskopf. So, in a sense, Emil Warburg, who held the Chair of Physics at Berlin, was indirectly responsible for the quark theory.
To provide a brief picture of this remarkable physicist and professor, here is the beautiful and elegant obituary address for Emil Warburg by his pupil James Franck, the supervisor of Victor Weisskopf: (This is quoted from pages 77 and 78 of the book "Otto Warburg Cell Physiologist Biochemist and Eccentric" by Hans Krebs and Roswitha Schmid, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.
"We admire him as the master of the art of experimentation whose results greatly enrich our science; as the teacher, whose pupils continue his work in his spirit all over the world, in academic centres as well as in industry; and last but not least as the man whose objectivity, fairness and lack of prejudice was never affected by success whether his own or that of others.
His classical achievements did not spring from the sudden flashes of an exceptionally gifted brain. They came out of the hard work of a straightforward and objective experimenter who knew the art of asking questions ripe to be tackled and who thereby arrived at so many valuable and clear-cut answers.
In 1895 he succeeded Kundt in the Chair of Physics at Berlin, but before this he had already published the first edition of his Experimental Physics which presented concisely and precisely the substance of his great course of lectures for beginners. From this book, many generations of students, students of physics in particular, have learned the foundations of physics and from it have acquired a high standard of simplicity and brevity in expression together with elegance and precision in definition. The book is not meant for 'dipping into'; if one wants to absorb its lessions one has to study it in depth because every word of every sentence has be carefully thought out. The book is characteristic of Warbur's own attitude to science which he also expected, almost as a matter of course, from his pupils. He who is not committed heart and soul to research had best leave it alone. His successes have justified his views, for his book has so far appeared in 22 editions. The last, which appeared in 1929, was brought up to date by Warburg himself, who at that time was 84 years old.
He who was not full of the desire to learn and was not prepared to devote all his energies to the work did not attempt to ask Warburg to be admitted to his laboratory. Once accepted, you entered a community almost like a big family, for life was lived almost entirely in the laboratory. You appeared punctually in the morning and certainly well before the professor made his round. At mid-day there was only time for a brief snack in a nearby bar, and for the evening meal people preferred to stay in the laboratory where work often continued late into the night.
The long working day made it necessary to have occasional breaks, during which there were discussions about what the professor had said and when individual problems were aired and thrashed out. These discussions were no less important than the bench work. There were no secrets in Warburg's laboratory any moe than there was envy when others made good progress. The objectivity of the leader transmitted itself to every member."

James Franck

A second bit of trivia is that Victor Weisskopf almost went to work for the distinguished theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld "Herr Geheimrat" as he refers to him on page 30. Had the distinguised professor Weisskopf worked for Professor Sommerfeld at Munich instead of Max Born and James Franck at Gottingen, he himself might have invented "Regge Poles" instead of Tulio Regge.

I'm amazed at the people that apparently feel no shame in sitting here safely in the 21st. century rendering their "very important" opinion on what some people had to decide in real time. What arrogance!